Someone is wrong on the internet!
Lured by a metaquotes post, I was browsing through the antitheism community. I found an example of bad reasoning (in support of a conclusion I agree with *sigh*). I went to post a reply when I discovered that the community only allows members to post. So I thought I would post it here instead:
I saw this question posed in one of the threads from your group, and I'd be curious to know how you would answer it: "A final scenario: you're in a burning room. Equally distant from you are a young child and a freeze unit containing 500 fertilized embryos. You can only carry one out with you. Do you save the one real, existing child, or the 500 "potential" children who will spend the rest of their "lives" waiting in freezers to be incinerated anyway?"
Well, if you're saving the child, you're basically admitting that you value the lives of people more than the lives of embryos. If ESC ends up helping us find a cure for cancer then wouldn't that be akin to saving the child? Not trying to research to our full extent is basically like saying "oh well we won't try to save the child if it means we have to destroy the 500 embryos."
Um, no. What if the choice was between saving the child and saving a lottery ticket that if you won might enable you to set up a charity that saved hundreds of children's lives? The point is that the actual child, here and now, outweighs the chance that you might win the lottery and only then be able to save the children. Similarly, you can't weigh the value of a cure for cancer against the value of the children/stem cells - rather you have to weigh chance of finding a cure via ESC * the value of the cancer cure against the value of the children stem cells.
I'm by no means convinced your friend has studied the issue enough to correctly assign a weight to that probability, but I think sound argumentation is valuable in its own right.
I saw this question posed in one of the threads from your group, and I'd be curious to know how you would answer it: "A final scenario: you're in a burning room. Equally distant from you are a young child and a freeze unit containing 500 fertilized embryos. You can only carry one out with you. Do you save the one real, existing child, or the 500 "potential" children who will spend the rest of their "lives" waiting in freezers to be incinerated anyway?"
Well, if you're saving the child, you're basically admitting that you value the lives of people more than the lives of embryos. If ESC ends up helping us find a cure for cancer then wouldn't that be akin to saving the child? Not trying to research to our full extent is basically like saying "oh well we won't try to save the child if it means we have to destroy the 500 embryos."
Um, no. What if the choice was between saving the child and saving a lottery ticket that if you won might enable you to set up a charity that saved hundreds of children's lives? The point is that the actual child, here and now, outweighs the chance that you might win the lottery and only then be able to save the children. Similarly, you can't weigh the value of a cure for cancer against the value of the children/stem cells - rather you have to weigh chance of finding a cure via ESC * the value of the cancer cure against the value of the children stem cells.
I'm by no means convinced your friend has studied the issue enough to correctly assign a weight to that probability, but I think sound argumentation is valuable in its own right.